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Task 1: Cosmetic Touch-Up

When you have a picture in dire need of help, the smartest place to start is to get rid of all the dust. Only Adobe Photoshop Elements managed to replicate Photoshop CS's effective dust removal. Paint Shop Pro and Digital Image Pro did a passable job, but several others were ineffective or clumsy. Print Shop Pro 20 and PhotoImpact, for example, left us with the unenviable task of using the clone brush to stamp out dust one speck at a time. Arcsoft PhotoStudio's default setting blurred our image into an impressionistic mess and required us to make manual adjustments. Photoshop Elements's default setting did a much better job without causing undue blurring.

Red-eye removal, on the other hand, was particularly easy with several applications. Without a doubt, Paint Shop Pro stands head and shoulders above the competition for red-eye removal. Instead of simply stamping a black dot over the retina or desaturating the red like most other image editors do, Paint Shop Pro actually stamps a customizable replacement eye in its place. You can tweak the eye color, size, glint, and even species (yes, you can remove the red from your dog's eyes). On the other hand, SmartDraw Photo distinguished itself as uniquely bad here, with only three preset sizes and no transparency adjustment. Its tool placed a pure-black cross in the iris, which made our subject look like an evil lizard alien, announcing her plans to conquer Earth from some hotel in Indiana.

If your photo has bigger blemishes than dust motes, you'll need a program with cloning and/or healing tools, so you can copy adjacent, clean parts of the image over the imperfections. We had two primary targets set in our sights for the cloning and healing tools--the long hair that runs over our subject's face, and the microphone stand that obscures her left arm. Both had to go before we could isolate her from the background.

For these tasks, Microsoft Digital Image Pro was our hands-down favorite. Most programs required us to carefully dab over the microphone stand with their clone brushes; but using Digital Image Pro's Smart Erase tool, we simply outlined the object, and the program automatically erased it--with very believable results. The program also contains a traditional cloning tool, which we used to clean up a few leftover artifacts.

CorelDraw's clone brush is virtually unusable, and SmartDraw doesn't have a dedicated clone brush at all--instead, we used its multipurpose touch-up tool, but it was unable to remove either the hair or the microphone stand in our example photo without leaving visible smears and artifacts. And the clone brush in Print Shop Pro 20 offers a mere six sizes, with no way to fine-tune its operation, causing us to massacre the woman's face while trying to remove the hair over her cheek.

The Triple Bypass

Now we were ready to perform some major surgery: to separate our subject and podium from the background. This was a real challenge because the image's low contrast made it hard for the programs to find the boundary between the foreground and the background. Don't get us started on her hair--we had to guess where her 'do ends and the nearly identical background begins. Knocking out the background was easiest in programs like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro, both of which have Photoshop-style background erasers. As with a traditional eraser tool, you drag a background eraser around your image, but you don't have to be exact--a background eraser can discern color changes and the edges of your subject in order to remove the background intelligently. Even so, to trace an outline of the woman's hair we had to resort to a Smart Edge tool in Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements (where it's called a Magnetic Lasso). This tool automatically snaps a selection onto high-contrast boundaries near the cursor as you move around the image, which is much easier than trying to trace an object by hand.

Paint Shop Pro comes out on top for having a smoother, less "twitchy" background eraser than the one in Photoshop Elements, which lagged behind our mouse movements and sometimes overshot the edge, erasing more than we intended. PhotoImpact was a great runner-up--it lacks a background eraser, but its magnetic lasso tool tracked edges superbly, and it includes a Bezier curve-style keypoint system that lets you adjust a selection after you've made it. In most apps, once you select a boundary, it's set in stone. CorelDraw's image editor, Corel Photobook, doesn't have a magnetic lasso tool. We resorted to using its freehand lasso tool and automask function, but the tool didn't accurately select our dimly lit subject.

Before pasting the foreground image onto the new background, we needed to feather the edge of our speaker to create the illusion of space between her and the background. Most of the programs support edge feathering (though Print Shop Pro 20 allows no feathering of any kind). ArcSoft PhotoStudio produced the least impressive results, and we could apply its "soft edges" function only after adding the foreground as a new layer in a new composition. The blurred edges looked clearly artificial, as if the speaker were pasted on. Likewise, without feathering, the foreground in Print Shop Pro 20 resembled one of those magnetic Colorform stickers you might have played with as a kid, standing out in sharp contrast to the background.

Task 2: Quick Fixes

The new background needed some work as well. Thankfully, making adjustments to brightness, contrast, and color saturation was a snap with almost all the programs. We particularly appreciated the Quick Fix option in Photoshop Elements and--even more--the One Step Photo Fix in Paint Shop Pro. Elements's Quick Fix requires a separate step for each adjustment (such as focus and color), while One Step Photo Fix runs an entire script of fixes. We didn't have to make each adjustment manually in Paint Shop Pro: Its auto fixes were spot-on. In contrast, Roxio's PhotoDoctor wizard produced disastrous results, dramatically overexposing our image, though we were able to use its manual sliders to make things look right.

For the most precise control over color and lighting, we prefer to work with a Photoshop-like level control, which lets you set the exposure in highlights and shadows by manipulating the x-axis of a histogram. The histogram is a graph that shows the quantity of information stored in each color channel in your image. In plain English, it shows how many pixels are dark and light--the darkest to the left, and the lightest to the right. Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Digital Image Pro, and PhotoImpact all include levels controls, but PhotoImpact had other handy manual controls as well, like a tone map (which helps redistribute colors to fix imbalances or remove unwanted shadows) and separate histograms for highlights, shadows, and midtones (for very precise contrast control).

The entire image seemed slightly askew, so we wanted to rotate it a little bit as well. Print Shop Pro 20 made this cumbersome: its photo editor rotates an image only in 90-degree increments. For incremental rotations, you have to import the image into a project. Several programs (like PhotoSuite, Paint Shop Pro, and Digital Image Pro) permitted us to straighten the image just by aligning an on-screen rule. ArcSoft PhotoStudio failed to include a straightening ruler, and it wouldn't let us rotate by fractions of degrees--whole numbers only. To straighten an image, it often takes just a very small adjustment to make a picture look perfectly true.